| RolStoppable said: The Wii has been and still is the fastest selling home console in video game history, except in Japan. But despite this huge success third parties have been hesitant to give Nintendo's little white box serious support. Why is that? Well, now we know. In an interview, Brian Pass, senior producer at Activision said: "There's roughly 12 million Wiis in North America." So where does this figure come from? Remember what was said about the Wii's horsepower? That it is just a Gamecube on steroids. If you tell yourself something often enough, you eventually start to believe it. And third parties did. The result is that they look at Gamecube hardware sales to determine what level of support the Wii should get and that's why the Wii is stuck with second and third rate games. It makes perfect sense. |
Nintendo is focused on making games that will be talked about with a sense of nostalgia for years to come. Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was in my opinion, inferior, to Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but it was good enough for many of my friends to speak fondly of it 10 years later.
Conversely, game developers and their publisher masters are focused on pumping out half-assed games because they have a quarterly bottom line to meet. Any game based off of a movie, Modern Warfare 2, Alan Wake, and on are clear examples where companies hype a bad product so that it sells a few million in the first month in order to appease individuals with the worldview of Bobby Kotick.
It is sad that the business side is messing with the gaming side. The gamers see this and that is why the Wii has sold twice as many more hardware units than PS3s. Then you would counter, what about all the casual games on the Wii?
What about them I say? A game is a game whether it be Tetris, Pong, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, or Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall. Some people like to become hermits and spend 50 to 100 hours on their epic, obscure title, while they scoff at those who play games that they deem "casual" a tenth as much as they play their epic, obscure title. At the same time, those so called "casual" gamers view the "hardcore" gamers as having no life and looking like Cartman, Stan, and Kyle in the South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft."
If you consider yourself a hardcore gamer, then do you view hardcore WoW raiders with reverence or do you view them as hopeless addicts who need to get out more?
The amount of fun one cannot get out of a game is not at all related to the length, production costs, and development costs. Hell, I enjoy playing Tetris more than some Xbox 360 games whom are loaded with out of the way, pointless collectables just so that ex-WoW players such as myself will go neurotic in getting all of them. Games where the objective is simple and unobscured by collectables that have no relation to the story, I find more enjoyable most of the time.
